There appeared to be a glimmer of hope for the restaurant industry last month, when BlackBox Intelligence’s TDn2K titled its most recent Restaurant Industry Snapshot: “Flat Sales, Welcome Change for Restaurant Industry in January.” In the report, it said that “while same-store sales growth was flat (zero percent) in January, it represented a welcome break from the ten consecutive months of negative sales growth experienced by the industry through the end of last year.” That finding, however, was refuted by a recent Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll which found that one-third of the 4,200 adult respondents said they were eating in restaurants less often than three months ago. The poll was conducted in the second half of January. Of them, 62% cited cost as the primary reason.

The modest recovery was also denied by the most recent Restaurant Performance Index report by the National Restaurant Association, which lamented that “same-store sales and customer traffic levels remained soft” in January, which kept the Current Situation Index (tracking same-store sales, traffic, labor and capital expenditures) at 98.6 in January, the fourth consecutive month of contraction, and tied for the worst print in four years.

More concerning was the disclosure by restaurant operators, 50% of whom said same-store sales declined year-over-year, the second highest reading in recent history and second only to the 53% reported last August.

Quite unlike the rosy picture of consumer spending painted by various other macroeconomic data points such as consumer spending, or even alleged wage growth, looking at one of America’s favorite pastimes – eating out – the situation has rarely been more gloomy.

While the silver lining to the latest RPI report was a surge of hope in the near-term futures as a result of the “animal spirits” unleashed by Trump, which have impacted everything from the stock market to the jobs report (recall the January-February plunge in people out of the labor force was the biggest on record), the latest, just released report by TDn2Kquickly doused those hopes in its latest, February, Restaurant Industry Snapshot which found that “Restaurant Sales and Traffic Tumble in February.”